Two studies investigate the way in which children make sense of a play and the visual, aural, and psychological components of theatre which contribute to this comprehension. In the first study, 32 fifth graders saw "Don Quixote of La Mancha." In the second study, 45 third graders saw "Monkey, Monkey" (about the Chinese Monkey King). The day after…

A study examined how global coherence in story comprehension develops in children through causal inference. Stories of contrasting structure were analyzed by a causal network model. Evidence of parallels between the construction of coherent representations and the development of the story understanding is presented. Data show that children…

Describes the development of an artificial intelligence system called GIDE that analyzes student errors in statistics problems by inferring the students' intentions. Learning strategies involved in problem solving are discussed and the inclusion of goal structures is explained. (LRW)

The differences in children's ability to answer inferential questions from pictures, print, and print with pictures was studied. The results indicated that the students performed better in the picture-only and print-with-picture conditions. The more skilled readers scored higher than the less skilled in print only condition. (Author/JAZ)

Second and third graders and fifth and sixth graders were tested in a very large, unfamiliar environment to determine the relation of their knowledge of an abstract reference frame to performance on a spatial inference task. (HOD)

Describes three experiments that examined how children (4- to 11-year-olds) use their knowledge of the attributes of living things to infer whether particular objects are alive. (HOD)

Describes 10 categories of inferences and proposes a three-step procedure for teaching students to make inferences while reading. (HOD)

The Bayesian inferential process is modified for use in an aggregate meta-analytic evaluation. Compared with the average effect size meta-analytic approach, the Bayesian approach was more sensitive, more consistent and more powerful. This approach is recommended when primary data are not available and when all evaluations involve comparisons of…

An on-going study is examining a method proposed by S. Goetz and D. Debertin for estimating demand for educational attainment at the county level by using secondary data. The method produces compact information showing the relationship between employment, occupation, and educational attainment, information not available at the county level. The…

This collection of activities is designed to show how graphing calculators can be used to explore statistics. The activities address such topics as data representation, distributions, and statistical tests. Teaching notes and calculator instructions are included as are blackline masters. (MM)

This study used the "double easy-to-hard" paradigm to examine the hypothesis that the class inclusion (CI) task should be equivalent in relational complexity to the transitive inference (TI) problem. Participating in the study were 64 girls and 50 boys, with a mean age of 8 years, 6 months. Stimuli for easy versions of the tasks were…

Examines three complete basal reading programs to determine how frequently logically necessary relationships are expressed in the text and whether direct instruction in making logically necessary inferences accompanies such expressions in basals. Finds that, although basals offer a natural context in which logical understanding may be constructed,…

Discusses and compares the meaning of epistemic uses of modals. Demonstrates that the relation between them is not as simple as has been frequently suggested. The article bases its observations on the data from a corpus of parallel French and English texts, pointing out that such a corpus can open new avenues for investigation of an old topic. (18…

This paper argues that statistical inference practices in both educational and psychological research should be directed away from traditional significance tests in favor of Bayesian inferential methods. Regular use of exploratory data analytic methods is recommended in conjunction with computer intensive resampling methods. Approaches to…

Three experiments examined strategies for solving suppositional deductions to compare control structures proposed by rule theory and model theory. Puzzles were based on assertors who may be truth-tellers and their assertions about their truth-telling status. Reasoners made backward and forward inferences, found generating suppositions difficult,…